At the Crossroads of Church and Race, a Reporter Glimpses His Childhood

I grew up in a little Baptist church in small-town Alabama. The Baptist part is inherited, like baldness or dimples: Both of my grandfathers and three of my uncles were Baptist preachers, and my parents met as graduate students at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Genes aside, the church — plastic chairs, pilling carpet and grape juice for communion — was the organizing institution of my childhood, where I met my closest friends and most of the significant adults in my life.

Church attendance has been in generational decline. I began calling around, exploring whether people in small towns were looking for community elsewhere and, with the white nationalist rallies so often in the news, whether young white people were looking for meaning in the grim sanctuaries of the alt-right.

But I kept hearing about something different. Pastors, theologians and sociologists were talking of how black worshipers were leaving white-majority churches. They were leaving quietly and not en masse, a family here, a single person there. But it was happening everywhere, a movement large enough for some to see the unraveling of decades of efforts at racial reconciliation.

I would find someone on Facebook, a black worshiper who had posted about leaving her mostly white church, and then I would find someone in the same situation halfway across the country. They would both think they were going through this alone, yet the accounts would be remarkably similar, the timelines nearly identical, even some of the words and phrases the same. There had been, I discovered, some sharp reporting about this, particularly from the writer Deborah Jian Lee, but not as much as you would expect for an experience that seemed to be this broadly shared.

People spoke to me of being tired, let down, heartbroken. Political and cultural partitions that they had long overlooked at worship time now overshadowed every service. The realizations almost always began with the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012, and a sense that white church leaders or fellow worshipers did not want to talk about how a black teenager walking home from a 7-Eleven could end up dead. Sometimes the preacher would privately express sympathy, but also concern about how his white congregation would take it. Maybe there would be a meeting.

Then the Trump election came, with its troubling racial overtones. For many, it wasn’t even complicated at that point. They just stopped going.

Among dozens of interviews, several were with people in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, the national hatchery of the megachurch. I went to a few different services there but kept hearing about Gateway, one of the largest churches in the country. I heard of a dozen people who had left or were planning to leave, including Ms. Pruitt, the woman who became the center of the story. Those I was able to reach knew of others. Most attributed their break to the senior pastor’s decision to align himself with President Trump (he did not explicitly endorse from the pulpit, but his preference was clear).

At the same time, I saw black families who continued to attend services at Gateway when I went. I knew that there were black pastors on staff and I learned that the senior pastor, who has an African-American son-in-law, had preached a widely shared sermon on the sin of racism in the fall of 2017. This was an interesting case study.

Back to the little church I grew up in. It was founded in 1971, before I was born, by exiles from the main Baptist church in town. They were the smaller faction in a dispute over whether the church, all white at the time, would invite the nearby black churches to a community Thanksgiving service. The pastor was for it, a narrow majority of the congregation was opposed, and so the pastor was forced to leave.

He and some of the others from the church began meeting around town, in a hardware store, a bank, a movie theater, in a series of gatherings that would go on to become a new church in town — the one I still go to when I visit home.

I had been thinking of that church when I set out to report this story, but had little idea how relevant it would be.